Interim Leadership in a Maintained Special School

A practical guide for governors, chairs and local authority officers

Governing bodies in maintained special schools often find that the guidance available to them was written for somewhere else. Most of what’s published about interim headship assumes either a large mainstream school with a deep leadership bench or an independent setting where a proprietor can simply decide.

A maintained special school is neither. It’s usually small, the leadership team is thin, the local authority has a genuine interest without having the decision, and the pupils have needs that make the appointment consequential in a way it wouldn’t be elsewhere.

Many chairs tell us the hardest part was working out who actually decides. This guide sets out the answer, along with a realistic timeline and what the governing body should settle before it appoints anyone.

Who appoints an interim headteacher in a maintained special school?

The governing body does. Appointing the headteacher, substantive or interim, is a governing body function, and it isn’t something the local authority does on your behalf.

That said, the authority has a legitimate role and it’s worth using rather than resisting. They’ll usually offer HR support, they may have a pool of experienced leaders across their special schools, and they’ll have a view on whether an executive or federated arrangement makes sense. Where a school is causing concern, that interest becomes more active.

Practically, most governing bodies delegate the appointment to a small panel, typically the chair and two or three governors, with authority to appoint within agreed parameters. Set that up properly at a full meeting rather than trying to convene fourteen people at short notice.

Check your own instrument of government and your scheme of delegation before you start, because they’ll say what the governing body has already decided about who can act between meetings.

How long does it take?

Longer than in an independent school, and it’s worth planning for that honestly.

The obstacle isn’t usually finding a candidate. It’s governance. A governing body that meets termly, needs to convene a panel, wants HR advice from the authority and has to agree terms will take three to four weeks on the process alone, before anyone has been interviewed.

From our experience, four to six weeks is realistic for a considered appointment and two to three is achievable in a genuine emergency if the chair has delegated authority and the authority’s HR team moves quickly. Neither timeline shortens the safer recruitment checks, which are the same for an interim as for anyone else.

The single biggest thing you can do to speed this up is agree, in advance, who can act. Governing bodies that have already delegated emergency appointment powers to the chair move in days. Those that haven’t spend a fortnight arranging a meeting.

Should you advertise first or appoint an interim?

These aren’t alternatives, and treating them as a choice is where governing bodies most often lose time.

Headship recruitment in a special school realistically takes two terms once you allow for advertising, shortlisting, appointment and the successful candidate’s notice period. If your head leaves at Christmas, a permanent appointment starting in September is a good outcome, not a slow one.

That means the question isn’t whether to advertise or appoint an interim. It’s how you cover the intervening two terms. Sometimes an acting arrangement from within is right. Sometimes an interim headteacher is. What doesn’t work is deferring the cover decision because you’re hoping the recruitment will be quicker than it will.

What about an interim executive board?

Worth understanding, and worth not confusing with interim leadership.

An interim executive board replaces the governing body, not the headteacher. It’s a governance intervention, used where governance itself is judged to be the problem, and it’s the local authority or the Secretary of State who puts one in place rather than something a school arranges for itself.

An interim headteacher is a leadership appointment made by the governing body. The two can coexist, and in a school in serious difficulty they sometimes do, but they answer entirely different questions.

If your school is under pressure and the conversation with the authority has started touching on governance, an external review of governance commissioned by you is a far better position than waiting to have one imposed.

What should the governing body agree before appointing?

Six things, and settling them beforehand makes the appointment straightforward.

The brief. Three or four things this placement must achieve. Not a job description.

Delegated authority. What the interim can decide alone, in figures. Governing bodies are often vaguer about this than proprietors are, and it stalls schools.

Duration and review points. An expected end date and at least two reviews.

Days and pattern. Full time or part time, and what happens if the school needs more.

Safeguarding. Who holds the designated safeguarding lead role, and whether the interim is taking it. If your departing head held it, this needs settling on day one with someone properly trained.

Reporting. One named governor as the point of contact, not the whole board.

What makes the special school context different?

Three things, and they should shape who you appoint.

The leadership team is usually small, so there’s rarely a deputy who can absorb headship without leaving a second gap. A mainstream secondary can lose a head and still have four assistant heads. A sixty pupil special school often can’t.

The pupils’ needs make the appointment consequential in a specific way. EHCP compliance, annual review cycles, therapy provision, physical intervention and health care plans are all leadership responsibilities here, and a leader without special school experience will spend a term learning them. Your pupils don’t have that term spare.

The external relationships matter more. The authority is your commissioner as well as your maintaining body, and other schools may be relying on you for outreach. An interim needs to be able to hold those conversations credibly.

What do you tell the local authority and the DfE?

Tell the authority early and directly, at chair to officer level. They’ll find out anyway, and hearing it from you means they arrive as a source of help rather than as someone checking up on you.

Keep your GIAS record accurate. It’s public, and an out of date headteacher on a public record is the version parents and other agencies see.

And tell your staff, families and any schools you work with. In a special school, families often have long relationships with the head, and a leadership change lands harder than it would elsewhere. A short, honest letter is worth a great deal.

From our experience

The delay in maintained special schools is almost always governance rather than supply. We often see a governing body take four weeks to convene and agree a process, during which a deputy is quietly holding headship with no written arrangement.

Many chairs tell us they wished they’d delegated emergency powers years earlier. It takes one agenda item at a routine meeting and it saves a fortnight at the worst possible moment.

The second pattern is a governing body appointing on general headship credentials because that’s what the authority’s HR process is set up for. Schools that appoint well insist on special school experience specifically, and are willing to wait a fortnight longer to get it.

A common misconception

“The local authority will sort out our leadership gap.”

It’s an understandable assumption, and authorities are often genuinely helpful. But the appointment is the governing body’s decision and the accountability sits with you.

Waiting for the authority to lead on it is how schools lose six weeks. Ask for their support, use their HR expertise, take seriously any view they offer about federation or executive arrangements, and then decide yourselves.

The children in your school need the adults who are accountable for them to act, and in a maintained special school that’s the governing body.

Questions for governors

• Have we delegated emergency appointment powers to the chair, and is it minuted?
• Who holds safeguarding today, and are they properly trained for it?
• Can we describe in half a page what this placement must achieve?
• Have we told the local authority ourselves, at the right level?
• Are we insisting on special school experience, or accepting general headship credentials?

Our perspective

Governing bodies in maintained special schools carry a genuine appointment responsibility with less support than they’d like and, usually, less time than they’d want.

The schools that handle it best did the preparation before they needed it. Delegated powers agreed, scheme of delegation understood, a working relationship with the authority already in place, and a realistic view of how long headship recruitment actually takes.

Every school’s circumstances are different, but that preparation is what turns a leadership departure from a crisis into a manageable term, and it’s what keeps the children and young people in your school getting the education they were promised throughout it.